CONFORMING TO

NOTES

SUSv2 and POSIX.1-2001 contain text about overflow (which might set
errno
to
ERANGE,
or raise an
FE_OVERFLOW
exception).
In practice, the result cannot overflow on any current machine,
so this error-handling stuff is just nonsense.
(More precisely, overflow can happen only when the maximum value
of the exponent is smaller than the number of mantissa bits.
For the IEEE-754 standard 32-bit and 64-bit floating-point numbers
the maximum value of the exponent is 128 (respectively, 1024),
and the number of mantissa bits is 24 (respectively, 53).)

The integral value returned by these functions may be too large
to store in an integer type
(int,
long,
etc.).
To avoid an overflow, which will produce undefined results,
an application should perform a range check on the returned value
before assigning it to an integer type.

SEE ALSO

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 3.81 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
information about reporting bugs,
and the latest version of this page,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.